


Archie's Weird High School Reunion

by focacciabread



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Aliens, Canon Compliant, F/F, High School Reunions, M/M, Multi, POV Alternating, Pining, it's about old friends, it's also about bad dialogue and insane plot threads, up until this next season is released that is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-20
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-18 12:02:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28866705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/focacciabread/pseuds/focacciabread
Summary: “More than that,” Archie says. “It’s—belonging to someone. This, this is embarrassing, but I honestly feel like I haven’t made any friends like the ones I left behind here, you know?”Kevin looks at him with an expression that might contain pity but is overall much too kind for Archie to be upset by it. “Hey, there’s nothing wrong with that,” he says, placing a hand on Archie’s shoulder and raising his other in a mock toast. “To Archie Andrews, and the people we belong to, huh?”As Archie smiles and taps the back of Kevin’s hand with his own, savoring this unexpected comfort on a tiled bathroom floor, he tilts his head back against the wall and tries to think of who exactly that might be.
Relationships: Archie Andrews/Jughead Jones, Betty Cooper/Veronica Lodge, Cheryl Blossom/Toni Topaz, Reggie Mantle/Munroe "Mad Dog" Moore
Comments: 10
Kudos: 31





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this is for me. Me, and perhaps my younger sister who has too many friends to actually read fanfiction and will never know this exists so really it’s for me. I was forced to quarantine w her for like 5 months, watched that jarchie ybwm music video (you know the one), joked with her about writing a riverdale movie script, wrote 7 pages of that, and then decided I’d just translate it into like 20k of fanfic instead. So enjoy the fruits of my labor, I guess 
> 
> I tried to write it as the characters would speak which at times turned out like so unspeakably annoying so if you’re reading this like who fucking talks like that just remember this is based on RIVERDALE and the answer to that question is: Veronica. also: used the jughead opening monologue to exorcise my inner pretentious asshole, I swear I don’t think that’s actually good writing. How’d I do?

Jughead VO: _Homecoming—that universal experience of old and fresh pains. Salmon, turtles, Atlantic puffins, and, apparently, human beings all feel the draw—regardless of what they know awaits them back at the place of their birth._

 _That being said,_ is _home always a place? If it’s not birth that determines where we migrate, perhaps we come home to the people who made us. Something inside, deeper than we could ever excise, pulls us towards each other again. That’s what we return to, again and again, even as the memories of the people we call our own fade in our minds._

_Reuniting in such a manner is at the top of one Archie Andrew’s mind as he contemplates the question we all must at some point in the short sojourn that is human life: what have I become?_

***

The Riverdale gym looks mostly unchanged, the way Archie supposes most high school gyms look the same no matter how much time passes. Despite the five years it’s been, seeing the old wrestling championship banners hanging limp on the walls still makes him feel nauseous in a way he can’t really explain.

Reflexively, he pats his chest where he’s placed his name tag and glances down for the third time since he walked in to make sure he’s put it on. The red bordered sticker stares back up at him from his left pectoral, but it’s with no little amount of dismay that Archie realizes for the first time that he’s put it on upside-down.

“Archie!” He looks up into the crowd milling around the gym but fails to find the source. For a second, he’s not sure he’s actually heard his name at all, but then his eyes land on a familiar figure a few tables away who’s waving him over.

Veronica Lodge, much like the Riverdale gym she looks both out of place and completely comfortable in, does not seem to have changed much. Her hair is different—up in a way that probably has a fancy French name Archie doesn’t know—but the smile crinkling her eyes and nose is just the same.

“Archiekins!” The nickname falls like a weight to the floor, but Veronica’s smile remains undimmed. “We were just talking about whether or not you’d show up,” she says, gesturing to the other two occupied seats at the table where Reggie and Munroe sit. For no good reason, Archie is surprised to see them.

“Ha, yeah,” Archie says, resisting the urge to look down at the floor. “Well, here I am.”

“Yeah man, it’s good to see you,” Munroe says, standing and reaching out for a hug. Archie’s startled for a second, but the embrace is nicer than Archie had expected it to be. “Weird that out of all of us, you weren’t the one to stick around in town.”

“Oh, are you still living here?” Archie says.

“Yep,” Reggie says, knocking a fist gently into Munroe’s hip from where he’s seated. “We’ve settled in pretty good. Munroe’s helping run the community center.”

“C’mon Reg, don’t give me all the credit,” Munroe says and turns back to Archie. “You know this guy’s a killer teacher? I swear, we’ve helped earn more GEDs than we know what to do with, how ‘bout that?”

“Yeah right, every kid we have is smarter than me,” Reggie says, but he’s smiling.

“Uh, no, I didn’t know,” Archie says. There’s something about the way they’re chatting so easily with each other that—doesn’t put him on edge, exactly, but has his ears perked. “So—you’re both in town then?”

“They sure are, Archie,” Veronica says. Archie’s gets a bit lost in the familiar feeling of her bursting back into a conversation and doesn’t catch the glint in her eye until she’s speaking again. “They’re in town, you could say, till death do they part.”

Archie, confused, glances between Veronica’s precise little grin and Reggie and Munroe until Reggie sighs.

“I told you everyone was gonna wanna talk about it.”

“Well, hey, sorry if I didn’t exactly have our high school reunion at the front of my mind when I proposed,” Munroe says, but the annoyance in his voice must be false as there’s not a trace of it on his face.

“Sure,” Reggie says with an equally happy expression. “As long as everyone knows the wedding invites have already been sent and we are _not_ adding anyone to the guest list.” He looks to Veronica and Archie. “Sorry guys.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Veronica says. “I’ll find a way in.”

“Wait,” Archie says, feeling as if he’s dreaming, almost. “You two are—”

“Engaged,” Reggie says, holding up a hand to display a gold band Archie had missed. “Suck on it, red.”

“Oh.” Archie scrambles for a second. He’d kind of expected to see some engagements when he decided to attend this reunion, but more from long term couples he barely remembered than—this. “That’s—that’s really great you guys, I’m really happy for you.”

“Thanks,” Munroe says, easy smile still on his face. He elbows Reggie, who swats at him a little. “You know, we kind of have you to thank.”

“Archie?” Veronica says, more than a hint of disbelief in her voice. He can’t help but agree.

“Me?”

“Oh yeah, that’s how it started, didn’t it,” Reggie says. “Good old days.”

“Are you saying—Archie?” Veronica looks delighted.

Munroe just hums in assent.

“What about me?” Archie says, not knowing what’s being said but desperately wanting to. Or maybe he doesn’t. The words are already out of his mouth, though, so he supposes he’s finding out.

“Oh Archie,” Veronica says, her voice taking on a note of condescension. “Only you could be two whole people’s gay awakening and not know it.”

“I was—oh.” He feels like he’s saying that word too much. “You—I mean, I, I was that for you?”

“Yeah, thank God we eventually got better taste, huh?” Munroe says, laughing.

“I don’t know about that,” Archie says despite how dry his mouth has become. “You’re engaged to Reggie.”

Reggie pulls an arm back in a mock fist, as if he’s actually about to brawl with Archie here, over a flimsy table in their high school gym, but the joke of it and Munroe’s hand on his arm make him unfurl his hand. Their closeness, the rhythms they observe together, the push and pull, it all makes something in the pit of Archie’s stomach twist. Their body language alone speaks of years together, and years more to go. He can’t really help if his responding grin is slightly tinged with jealousy.

“The testosterone at this table, really,” Veronica says, rolling her eyes. “Enough about marital bliss—how have you been, Archie?”

“Oh,” Archie says, then curses himself. “Uh, yeah, I’ve been good.”

“Good?” Reggie says. “Man, if you were a kid in our writing workshop, even I’d fail you.”

“Well, I mean,” Archie says, and stops. He doesn’t really want to get into it here and now. “Yeah. Good.”

“Ooh.” Veronica’s eyes glint in the low light. “Playing it close to the chest—no worries, Veronica Lodge loves a mystery. By the end of the night, I’ll know all the dirty details of how you’ve been doing trading in these guns,” she squeezes his upper arm unexpectedly and he jumps, badly, “for real ones.”

It’s not specifically that statement that propels him to his feet quickly enough that his metal folding chair skitters noisily on the wood floor—it’s a combination of too many things to count. It’s Veronica’s question, the matching looks of concern on Reggie and Munroe’s faces, maybe even the familiar-yet-not shape of the old gym; he suddenly needs to be anywhere but here. Archie manages to mumble something to excuse himself and then he’s moving as quickly as he can towards where he thinks he remembers the gym bathrooms are.

Thankfully, Archie’s memory serves him well, and perhaps even more luckily, there’s no one in any of the scratched and scribbled-on metal stalls. He braces his hands on one of the sinks and tries to breathe in and out more steadily. He’s making decent progress when he makes the mistake of glancing up into the mirror to see his own pale and haggard face. He instantly feels so nauseated by the expression he’s wearing that he stumbles back and slides down the wall to sit with his arms braced on his knees.

Archie has no idea how long it’s been when he hears the bathroom door open again; he wipes a hand quickly down his face and shakes his head a little to prepare himself for whoever’s there. He doesn’t know the name for the exact emotion he feels when he sees its Kevin Keller, but it has him slumping back against the wall again. Relief, maybe.

“Hey,” Kevin says, hesitant. “Are you—I saw you head over here in kind of a hurry, is there something at the buffet table I should be avoiding? Besides like, all of it, I guess.”

Archie tries a smile and feels it make it onto his face with less issue than he’d feared. “Nah, Kev,” he says, waving a hand weakly. “This is—don’t worry about it.”

“Good to know that punch I had wasn’t completely poison,” Kevin says, and surprises Archie by sliding down the wall to sit beside him. “Ugh, I don’t think they’ve cleaned these floors since we went to school here.” He hums. “Weird, isn’t it?”

“The dirty floors?”

Kevin laughs a little. “No, just—being back here again.”

“Oh.” Something in Archie rises like a sickening tide. “Yeah, I guess.”

Kevin seems to study him for a moment in which Archie has no idea what his own face is doing. Kevin sighs.

“I feel so adolescent—like, I half expect Moose to walk through the door and insist ‘no Kev, I can’t _date_ you, let’s just make out against these disgusting locker room lockers,’” Kevin says with a twist to his mouth. “High school, right?”

“Well, I’m—you and I had pretty different experiences,” Archie says. He can feel his chest slowly loosening—weirdly, sitting on the bathroom floor with Kevin is actually doing a pretty good job in helping Archie get his feet back under him.

Kevin laughs. “I’ll fucking say,” he says. “Small town gay kid versus hometown sweetheart, there’s no universe where we do have the same experience.” He raps his knuckles softly on the ground for a second, thinking. “Although—neither of us really escaped the insanity of this godforsaken town, what, with two different cults? And I can’t even remember how many people got poisoned—hey, didn’t you go to _prison_? For _murder_?”

The sheer incredulity in his voice startles Archie into a laugh. “Yeah man, and that was hardly even the weirdest thing to happen that year.” It’s kind of nice to laugh about it now, the months of his life where he was barely sure he would make it to the next one. “My life hasn’t been that crazy since then, I swear. Actually, nothing really prepared me for how—not Riverdale the rest of the world is.”

Kevin huffs a laugh. “Yeah. Hey, this is gonna sound crazy, but do you ever,” he says, but stops, nose scrunching to one side. Somehow, Archie knows exactly what he was going to say anyway.

“Yeah,” he says, fixing his sight back on a broken tile on the floor. “I do.”

“That’s crazy though, right?” Kevin says. “I mean—I really shouldn’t miss _anything_ about this place. Even if it was a normal high school, it’s still _high school_.”

Archie considers it for a second. “Yeah, but there’s something—I don’t know—there’s a feeling I get here that I’ve never felt anywhere else,” he says, feeling as though he’s missed the mark of what he’s trying to say by a mile. He hasn’t tried this hard to articulate himself since he was still writing songs, sitting in the garage scribbling bad poems down in composition notebooks. The memory of doing that is tinted with a kind of embarrassment, but it’s warm, somehow. “It was—it was belonging to something, kind of.”

“I get that, actually,” Kevin says. “Being a part of something, no matter how fucked up it is—it’s kind of nice. Might help explain why I’m down a kidney.”

“More than that,” Archie says, feeling emboldened. “It’s—belonging to someone. This, this is embarrassing, but I honestly feel like I haven’t made any friends like the ones I left behind here, you know?”

Kevin looks at him with an expression that might contain pity but is overall much too kind for Archie to be upset by it. “Hey, there’s nothing wrong with that,” he says, placing a hand on Archie’s shoulder and raising his other in a mock toast. “To Archie Andrews, and the people we belong to, huh?”

As Archie smiles and taps the back of Kevin’s hand with his own, savoring this unexpected comfort on a tiled bathroom floor, he tilts his head back against the wall and tries to think of who exactly that might be.

***

Jughead scans the refreshment table, growing more bitter with every inch his eyes cover. First the pathetically small Riverdale High Reunion Committee hadn’t allowed him to write his own name tag, and now it looks as though there are no more on brand Oreos. Perfect.

The name tag thing had rankled him more than he’d like to admit—seeing Forsythe Jones staring up from the friendly red and white sticker had been strangely jarring. Strange, because he’d actually started going by it in college—trying to drop all memory of the agony going by Jughead wrought—but it just seems so out of place here. Forsythe, Jughead—they feel like separate parts of himself that he barely attempts to reconcile in the best of circumstances, much less now, standing in the darkened Riverdale High gymnasium. He’d settled for snagging a sharpie and scribbling a pointed crown in the corner of his tag—not that he wore one of those anymore either, but it had felt good, like sliding something back into place.

“Excuse me, can I—Jughead?” And there it is again, like a boulder on his back that he just can’t shake—maybe one that he doesn’t even want to shake. He wonders for a split second what exactly it is about a name that gives it so much weight. It’s just a word, a pair of syllables, hardly any different than other words. Is it merely the fact that he can call it his own that makes it so?

He turns to see who spoke it. “Ethel?”

“Yeah, hi! I was about to say your name again—you zone out there for a second?” She looks mostly the same, with maybe a slightly different haircut that leaves her hair short and curling around her ears. She smiles at him with her whole face. It feels unearned. “Wow, it’s been a while—how are you?”

“As well as a person can be when they decide to attend their five-year high school reunion,” he says, voice as dry as possible. Ethel laughs a little and tilts her head in acquiescence.

“Yeah, I debated coming here too, but, well.” She shrugs. Jughead is suddenly struck by the memory of Ethel in high school, and cringes internally. He hopes it’s been enough years that whatever strange fixation she had on him when they were seventeen has worn off somewhat; if not, he hopes for something to give him a quick escape. “I was in town. It’s kind of weird that they have this at all.”

“What, because no one in their right mind would return to this mausoleum of a school?” Jughead says, scanning the crowd over Ethel’s head. It’s full of people he doesn’t recognize, or worse, people he only kind of does.

“No—well, yeah, maybe, but more like,” she makes a vague gesture with one hand. “Why five years? What could have possibly changed in five years, you know?”

Jughead barely hears her as his aimless scanning of the gym crowd reaps unexpected results.

Betty Cooper.

She looks—Jughead’s not entirely sure what to make of how she looks, eyebrows puckered in a frown as she talks to someone on her phone. She looks like Betty Cooper, a sight which stirs up so many conflicting things inside him that he’s better off looking away. He doesn’t.

“Sorry Ethel, I—” He shakes his head, not taking his eyes off Betty as he pushes past her. “It was nice talking to you, but I have to go.”

“Oh, uh—okay,” he hears Ethel say as he begins to make his way through the crowd. “Bye, I guess.”

Betty sees him as he makes his way over, which is both a disappointment and relief. Jughead’s a little surprised when she abruptly finishes her call and shoots him a smile that he clocks at about 80% real, but he’s long since realized he’ll never really know exactly what to expect from her.

“Hey.” Betty’s voice is much the same. “I was wondering if I’d see you here.”

“Yeah, well,” he says, his tone already too bitter for their first conversation in years. “You would have known if, you know, you were still speaking to me.”

“Jug, come on,” she says, all pretenses of a smile dropping immediately. “Are we really going to rehash this every single time we see each other?”

“You can’t be—Betty, you disappeared for _five months_!” He isn’t trying to raise his voice—in fact, Jughead’s aware that making this mistake is near certain to be fatal for his argument, but he can’t help it.

Betty rolls her eyes, like he knew she would. “And as I’ve told you a dozen times, I couldn’t tell you about that, and I’m sorry,” she says, but the flatness of her voice betrays the falseness of her sentiment.

“You’d do it again.”

“Yes, I would, if it meant saving lives,” she says, and crosses her arms. “You used to be able to understand that.”

“What I understood was that we were part of something—together,” Jughead says. “I guess I didn’t realize that only meant until you’d found some better partner in crime.” It feels a bit childish even as he says it.

Betty sighs. “Jughead, I know, okay? I wish I could have told you that the death certificate was fake, that the crime scene was staged, but I couldn’t, alright,” she said. “And you need to let that go—you need to let _me_ go.”

“And if I don’t? Wait, wait, don’t tell me,” Jughead says with a bitter twist to his mouth. “You’ll,” he taps his chin in a mockery, “disappear under mysterious circumstances—again.”

“I don’t know,” Betty says, leveling him with an even stare. “I think relationships should be evenly split, Jug. It might be your turn to disappear.”

“Hi, sorry, am I interrupting anything?” The smile on Veronica’s face says she knows she is. “I couldn’t help but be drawn to this conversation like a moth to an,” she glances quickly between them, “an old flame, if you will.”

“It’s nothing,” Betty says. “I was just about to sit down, actually.”

“Oh,” Veronica says, looking disappointed. “You’re sure? Wait, my pearl-laden ears shouldn’t be burning, should they?”

Jughead fights the urge to roll his eyes. “No, shockingly, our first conversation in two years was not about you, Veronica.”

“You’ll excuse me for suspecting,” she says, voice turning a little frosty. “If I remember correctly, our high school relationships often did include more than just the two people in them.” She’s looking at Betty now, eyes heavy with something Jughead can’t quite assign a name to.

Before Betty can say whatever it is that she might in response to that—Jughead has forfeited his claim to knowing what that might be—Archie approaches their trio at what can only be described as a bound.

“Hey, Betty! Wow, it’s so good to see you,” he says, voice full of uncomplicated joy. “Ronnie, you too—holy shit, Jughead!” Jughead barely has time to register the rumpled look of Archie’s blazer before he’s reliving the first sac of the Riverdale Bulldogs’ 2017 season.

It’s a weird hug, there’s no doubt about it, especially considering the source. At best, Jughead had expected a one-armed slap when he had thought to picture this moment at all, but no, Archie’s arms are completely around his torso, clutching hard enough to bruise. Not that Archie would ever try intentionally to do so—as the air is being squeezed out of him, Jughead thinks that if there’s ever been a constant to Archie Andrews, it’s his unconsciousness of his own strength.

“Oh,” Veronica says as Archie finally pulls back. “Well, sorry I didn’t greet you like that, Bettykins, I wasn’t sure if it’d be welcome. You know, after you became harder to find than a reservation at the Ritz on Valentine’s day.”

“She pulled a Houdini on you too, huh?” Jughead says, suddenly feeling much warmer towards Veronica. Warmer, perhaps, than he did throughout all of high school.

She smiles at him, wry. “And I didn’t even realize the elephant was in the cabinet in the first place.” He turns a corner of his lip up in return.

“What are you guys talking about?” Archie says. He shakes his head. “No, never mind. Look, I know I’ve been kind of…absent from all of your lives for a while, it’s just been rough, what with my service, my mom’s new marriage, I just—” He shakes his head again, brightening forcibly as he does so. “But that’s what high school reunions are for, right? Reuniting? Man, I missed you guys.”

Jughead looks away from Archie’s painfully earnest face to share a glance with Betty and Veronica. He sees the same thing in their eyes he’s certain lives in his own: whatever their personal squabbles, for the night at least, they’ll put them aside. Here, they unite once again behind Archie Andrews, the mythic hero but yet the common man, spurred to oneness by the only thing that's remained after all these years: their love for him.

***

All of the time Veronica had spent worrying about being voted Riverdale High’s Most Likely to Be Pathetic at a High School Reunion had been wasted, apparently, because now none other than Archie Andrews has taken home the pot where that superlative is concerned.

It’s sad, she thinks, to see him so downtrodden—his ill-fitting blazer is rumpled, eyes darkened by bags he should _definitely_ be using some kind of retinol cream on. Really, they weren’t going to be in their twenties forever.

“So,” Archie says, breaking her out of her thoughts. “How have you guys been doing?”

“Clearly a lot better than you, Arch,” Betty says, but a barb that would be stinging from anyone else is made soft by her smile and the gentle way she reaches out to touch his elbow. Archie smiles a bit at this; Veronica feels her stomach sour.

She knows it’s not fair to still be angry about things that happened years ago, some even so far back as high school, but Veronica’s never really had a problem with feeling things that are unreasonable. Looking at Archie, even after all these years, stirs up some of the same panic she was trying her hardest not to feel all throughout her teenage years. Looking at Betty—

Veronica thinks that looking at Betty will always feel like pressing on a bruise—painful, of course, but more than the pain is the inexplicable draw to do it again and again.

She hadn’t left high school with any grand delusions, all too familiar with the phenomenon of drifting apart—too gentle a name by half. Back when Veronica had been seventeen and stupider, sometimes she’d felt like the sorest of thumbs, sticking out completely as a shiny new addition to these corn-raised small-town people who had been friends their whole lives. They’d attended each other’s ninth, tenth, eleventh birthdays, probably holding hands at each awkward transition—for God’s sake, Betty had been there to attempt to teach Archie how to read. Veronica had possessed no such equivalent at any point in her life, and she was painfully aware of this fact. Apparently, the quality other people had that inspired the type of friendship that lasted was nowhere in any of the five feet and two inches of her. Regardless, it had felt nice to slot in beside them for those few years, to lace her fingers in tight. Sometimes, she had almost felt like she fit.

Of course, looking at Betty now, she realizes that mistake for what it is. Clearly, despite the sad and frequent destination of her own musings, none of these people have given her a second thought since high school. Where assigning more meaning to relationships than the other party is concerned, Veronica Lodge is still the reigning champ, no contest. She shakes herself a little, trying to discard the depressing line of thinking like it’s an out of season faux fur coat—the kind that have always given her an angry looking rash—and smiles. She can handle this, she can handle anything; for better or for worse, she’s always been her father’s daughter.

Just as she’s opening her mouth to say something that hopefully won’t come off as wounded as it sounds in her head, the lights go out.

For a second, it’s utterly dark. Someone out in the yawning chasm of the gym yelps, someone else laughs.

“I remember that from high school,” an unidentified classmate’s voice mutters into the dark. “Mr. Flutesnoot couldn’t turn off the lights for the projector without someone screaming.”

“Do you think it’s because of the storm?” A new voice, somewhere to Veronica’s left. It might be someone she’d recognize if the lights are on—or maybe not. The darkness is freeing, even as phone flashlights start to come on. “Did that ever happen in high school?”

“I bet we could find the fuse box,” Betty says. Her voice startles Veronica a little in its closeness. “It’s probably in the gym office.”

“Oh, and you know where _that_ is?” Jughead says. Covered by the dark, Veronica rolls her eyes. They really are going to fight the entire time they’re here—as if their squabbles outrank any of her own.

“I think I could help find it,” Archie says, but the end half of his statement is drowned out by the overhead gym loudspeaker crackling to life. “Hey, wait…should that be working during a power outage?”

“No, Arch,” Veronica says, but she’s interrupted before she can continue.

“ _Prodigal sons and daughters of Riverdale_ ,” a voice crackles over the loudspeaker. Veronica doesn’t think she recognizes it, but she isn’t certain if that’s because it’s a computer generated one—the shitty quality of the gym loudspeaker and acoustics make it hard to tell. “ _How long I’ve waited_.”

“Who _is_ that?” someone in the crowd asks, only to be shushed viciously by both Betty and Jughead.

“ _I’m sure you’re asking yourselves a number of questions_ ,” the unknown voice continues, “ _who is that? What do they want? How are they doing this_?”

“Why was it necessary to black out the gym and make me nearly ruin a la Renta dress with cheap fruit punch,” Veronica says under her breath. In the dim light of their phones, she catches Archie shoot her a small grin. She smiles back, even though she’s entirely certain he doesn’t know what she’s talking about; if he did, maybe their relationship would have made it past high school.

“ _Graciously, I’ll provide an answer to one of these_.” A crackled filled pause. _“I want…to work with you_.”

“Deja vu, oh _major_ deja vu,” Betty mutters. Veronica tries to catch her eye, but she doesn’t look up from her phone, eyes squinted in the light of the screen where it’s opened the voice recording app.

“ _Your task is not an easy one, and for that I am sorry—but how else to prove your worthiness_?”

“What’s going on?” It’s Reggie, accompanied closely by Munroe with Kevin appearing somewhere behind them. The four of them take turns giving him a shrug.

“— _prove yourselves: find and disarm the three…gifts I’ve left you somewhere in these hallowed halls_ ,” the voice says.

“That’s bombs, right?” Kevin says. “Like, they’re absolutely talking about bombs.”

“ _You have three hours_ ,” the speaker finishes with a decent amount of finality. The loudspeaker buzzes for a moment, then they hear the piercing beep of a stopwatch and it clicks off, leaving an eerie silence in its wake.

A short-lived eerie silence that is, as it takes precisely two seconds for the entire Riverdale gymnasium to burst into speech.

“Did you hear—”

“—I think they said _bombs_ —”

“—actually, I didn’t understand shit, did you? Fuck, I’ve got such a headache now—”

“—remember when Josie and her band performed over the intercom? They were like, _good_ , and that was unbearable—”

“Quiet down everybody!” Jughead’s voice does a halfway admirable job of ringing out across the gym, but none of the reunion attendees seem to care. Veronica winces a bit in sympathy, but not too much—it’s Jughead.

“ _Hey_!” Munroe says, accompanied by a shrill whistle through the teeth by Reggie. The gym quiets.

“Over to you, needlenose,” Reggie says with a grin.

“Thanks,” Jughead says. “Okay, listen everyone, I know that was—insane, and probably pretty scary, but we need to think about a game plan.”

“Right,” a woman to their left says. Veronica thinks she recognizes her as one of the members of the alumni committee, maybe two or three years ahead of them in high school. “Thank you. Everyone please _calmly_ gather your things and proceed to the nearest exit—follow me or Christina here,” she points to another woman, one who’d been manning the reception table, “if you’re not sure where that is.”

“We will call the authorities once we all get out of the building,” Christina says, gesturing towards the doors with her hands. “Does everyone understand the plan?” Murmurs of assent ripple through the crowd as people start to move towards tables and exits.

“Wait,” Betty says. Her voice is pitched no louder than Jughead’s had been, but somehow, it rings much clearer through the air. “Is this who we are? Afraid?” She looks around the gym. “If there’s one thing I learned while attending Riverdale High, it was that nothing’s quite as satisfying as _not_ giving the bad guy what they want. If this were any other time, any other place, we could just stand by and let them win but right here, right now? What we need to do is trust our guts, follow our instincts, and fight.”

“Uh, yeah.” Christina again. “That’s why we’re…leaving? Like, it seems like what this— _psychopath_ wants is for us to all die in some weird hide-and-seek bomb hunt?”

“You guys aren’t seriously thinking about actually doing it, right?” the first woman says. “Oh, okay, _no_ , that is absolutely _not_ safe. We need to exit the building _immediately_.” She punctuates every word of the last statement with a small clap. Veronica thinks of kindergarten teachers. “This night is my responsibility, and I can’t be counting casualties at the end of it, got it?”

“Lady,” Jughead says. “We’re the Riverdale class of 2018. We can handle it.”

“A—a bomb threat?” Her face crumples up into what Veronica predicts will become some very unattractive wrinkles in a decade or so if she’s not careful. “You guys are like—twenty.”

“And we’ve dealt with more serial killers and psychopaths than you’ll probably ever meet,” Betty says. “We know what we’re doing.” The woman squints at Betty for a moment before shaking her head.

“You know what, sure,” she says. “The cops can deal with you when they get here—try not to explode. Everyone else—exits!”

The majority of the crowd continues to filter outside, a few people throwing glances over their shoulders to where the seven of them stand.

“Look at them,” Jughead says, a clear note of disgust in his voice. “Abandoning the school in its time of need. I hope they know they’re _destroying_ a sacred Riverdale _institution_!” The last part is projected to the departing horde, which has dwindled to a dozen or so waiting to get through the exit doors. None of them pay it much mind, but Betty shoots him a smile that he returns. Veronica’s stomach twists. It always did take a good crime or two to get them back on the same page, but once they were—that was it. Veronica can practically feel herself fading into the background. God, why is she _so_ incapable of forming any kind of lasting relationship? There’s something wrong with her, and other people can smell, or something. She’ll never have anyone to smile conspiratorially with, she’ll never have the return to form Betty and Jughead are experiencing right at this moment. She looks to Archie, but of course he isn’t looking back; instead, his gaze is focused somewhere over her head and lighting up in recognition.

“Hey—Ethel?” Archie’s voice is friendly, but a little baffled, a similar sentiment to Veronica’s own feelings towards the person he’s addressing.

“Hey guys,” Ethel says. “I just wanted to say—I really liked your speech back there, Betty.”

“Oh,” Betty says. “Thanks.”

“Yeah, and I was wondering if there was anything I could do to help? You know, if you’re actually planning on staying?” Ethel spreads her hands out in a shrug like gesture. “Old times sake, or whatever.”

“Uh, yeah,” Jughead says, a second too late. “Yeah, sure, I mean, if everyone else is, uh, cool with it?” There are various noncommittal murmurs. Veronica tilts her head to once side to convey that she has no problem with it, but you know, she doesn’t really care—it’s Ethel.

“I mean, I guess?” Betty says. “We’ve probably got it covered though. You can leave.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Ethel says, rolling her eyes. “Right, I guess _this_ hasn’t fucking changed since high school.”

Veronica sees Betty open her mouth to say something back, but before she can—

“Well,” a voice from behind them says. “Since we’ve only _just_ arrived, I guess we too can lend you Dickensian looking mongrels a hand.”

Standing at the entrance to the gym, decked in a red dress that looks to be made out of about one thousand layers of chiffon—much more appropriate for a gala than a high school reunion, Veronica thinks—is Cheryl Blossom.

“So,” she says, flouncing over towards them, Toni close behind her. She crosses her arms with a bright red grin. “What’s the plan?”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so that first episode, huh? i have not watched it
> 
> Anyway, here’s some more inaccurate speculation!

For Archie, interactions with Cheryl have always been tinted with a little bit of fear, and tonight is no different, regardless of the bomb threat. She carries herself in the same bulletproof way he remembers from high school, shoulders thrown back and smile turned up to maximum wattage. He looks away from her to avoid the kind of piercing eye contact she’s currently making with Veronica.

He realizes his mistake when it leads him to look straight at Betty and Jughead. God, he feels so guilty for the way just looking at his oldest friends is making him feel, but he can’t tamp down on the thread of jealousy and hurt coiling in his stomach. It’s made worse by the fact they’re not even really the direct cause of it; as always, the fault lands squarely on Archie’s own shoulders.

He’s not sure, but in the short amount of time he’s spent with the two of them during the reunion, it seems like there’s been some kind of—tension. They lack the pleasant equilibrium Archie saw them observe in high school. Despite this, now they’ve slid back together with an easy cohesiveness that Archie has never known, not even with Veronica. Veronica—with a dull sadness aching in his stomach, he thinks of where that particular road ended.

It hadn’t been a total disaster, their breakup, although maybe that was part of the problem. When you break up with your full-time high school sweetheart, isn’t it supposed to be messy? Archie had anticipated _some_ sort of heartbreak. But instead, it had all culminated in a deathly quiet conversation in which neither of them had even managed to tear up.

“You understand why we’re doing this, right?” Veronica had said. They had been seated on one of the couches in her Pembrooke apartment, a place that’s niceness had never failed to put Archie on edge. Veronica had been toying with the decorative fray of a pillow rather than look him in the eyes.

“Yeah,” he had said. Clearing his throat, “listen, Ronnie, I am really, really—”

“If you apologize to me one more time, Archie Andrews, I will hurl this pillow at your creamsicle-flavored head, I swear.” She’d sighed. “It’s not even really about you and Betty.”

“I know.” And he had. Something was wrong between the two of them, maybe had been since the very beginning. It had just been a little hard to assess exactly what that was when they had been busy doing the things required of them by high school: uncovering drug rings, busting cults, or in Archie’s case, running from nearly every arm of the law.

“I love you, Archie,” she'd said, looking him in the eye for the first time. “I mean that. But—with college, all that time apart—I just don’t think I can do this anymore.”

It’d saddened Archie, just how relieving those words had been to hear. “Hey, that’s okay,” he’d said. “You know, even if we’re not,” the words had stuck in his throat for a second, “even if we’re not together, I’ll always love you. I mean, you’re Veronica Lodge.”

She’d squeezed his hand with a smile. “And you’re the nicest boyfriend a girl could ask for,” she’d said. “Just—not this girl, apparently.” He’d left quickly after that, eager to avoid any run ins with the other occupants of the apartment, the clicking of his shoes on the lobby’s marble floor in time with his heartbeat.

And that had been the end of it, the saga of Archie Andrews and Veronica Lodge. Archie had missed it a little at first—not so much the person of Veronica, but rather the consistency of being part of a matched set. Sometimes, though, he still finds himself missing her—the bright heat of her attention focused on him, the way her smile compelled him to give one back even if he didn’t understand the joke.

He’d used to know her—he’d used to know all of these people. He’d known that Veronica would only eat fries if the ketchup was dispensed on top of them, even if it rendered them inedible to everyone else at the table. He’d known that Betty wouldn’t take her ponytail down during a test even if it was giving her a headache because having hair in her face distracted her that much. And he’d known how Jughead—there had been a time where there was nothing he didn’t know about Jughead. Archie’d known that he’d preferred a moodier kind of rock and roll, but wouldn’t complain too much if Archie put on country; he’d known that Jughead liked to wake up early but wasn’t actually ready for conversation until about an hour later; he’d known that if the bags under his eyes took on a certain darkness, it meant there was something going on with FP.

Now, though, it’s with a pain in his chest that Archie realizes Jughead and all the others may as well be strangers. He looks to Veronica and wonders what exactly it is she’s thinking as she looks to Cheryl with a raised brow.

“Okay,” Jughead says. “We need to try and figure out who we think this is. We’ve only got—” He glances to Betty.

“Two hours, fifty-five minutes.”

“—to work it out,” he finishes. “Any ideas?”

“How are we supposed to know who wants this place destroyed?” Reggie says. “Honestly, no offense or anything, but I feel like the most likely people are kind of standing right here.”

Toni snorts. She holds up her hands when Cheryl turns to look at her. “C’mon babe, you know our dining room’s still undergoing renovations.”

“Yeah, and Betty,” Veronica says face sharp in a way Archie knows hides a grin. “Didn’t you, that one time—”

“Anyway,” Betty says. “I think our best bet for a suspect is a member of the midnight club, right? Who has parents who still live in town?”

Cheryl, Jughead, Reggie, and Kevin all raise their hands.

“Well,” Cheryl says, using her raised hand to toss her hair back over her shoulder. “At least I _hear_ she’s settling in very nicely at the Sisters of Quiet Mercy. So, in the area.”

“Oh. That place still…” Archie trails off, not quite sure how to put it.

“Oh, no, it’s totally different now. They brought in some top rate psychiatrists from out of state and fixed the whole thing up,” Toni says, pulling out her phone and tapping around for a second. “Totally certified now. See?” She brandishes it. “Five-star Yelp rating.”

“If we’re thinking midnight club,” Jughead says, “then the detention room would be a safe bet. Or the closet, where they found—well. Someone should check the closet.”

Veronica lets out a gusty sigh and Archie feels his stomach turn to lead.

“Ronnie,” he says. “Please don’t say it.”

“I hate this as much as you do, Archie,” she says. “But—my father should not be ruled out.”

“Wait, I thought you said he wasn’t still in town?” Kevin says. “And didn’t he have some sort of, uh, disease?”

“Oh, he’s not—and he did, he got over it—his current underworld scheme is running a ring of cheap resorts in Bermuda, I think,” she says, shrugging. “I haven’t checked in for a while—but does that really rule anything out?”

It’s Archie’s turn to sigh. “Okay,” he says. “The gym, then, for wrestling—maybe someone can check the trophy cases?” They all nod.

Reggie clears his throat.

“What is it, Reg?” Archie says. “Your dad?”

“Oh, no, I have no idea what he’s up to, but I doubt it,” Reggie says. He looks to Betty with a wince. “I don’t wanna be rude, or anything, but—Betty?” Archie doesn’t know exactly what Reggie’s going to say, but he can’t help but preemptively agree.

“What?”

“He’s got a point,” Archie says. “Your parents?”

She heaves an eye roll Archie feels is a bit unwarranted. “My mom lives in like, Provincetown now, and my dad died junior year. Am I cleared, officer?”

“Are you sure?” Kevin says. “I mean, rest his soul, whatever, but are you?”

“Yeah, I mean, he faked his death the once—”

“Right, the once,” Kevin says.

“—but _Penelope_ ,” she gestures towards Cheryl, who executes a small curtsy like motion, “shot him in the head, so yeah, I think the man who was my father for eighteen years might actually be dead.”

“Sure,” Ethel says. “So, we’ll put that as, what, a maybe?” Archie’s a little surprised when she doesn’t shrink under Betty’s glare but smiles back slightly instead.

“Detention room, storage closet,” Jughead ticks off his fingers, “gym, and trophy cases? Any other suggestions?” When no response comes, he claps his hands together. “Okay, lets break into groups.”

“Wait, really?” Munroe says, glancing around to all of them. “Do you think that’s safe?”

“It’s Riverdale—safe is a relative concept,” Kevin says, then tilts his head. “But, you know, now that I think about it, I’d rather stick around in the gym—if that’s alright with everyone.”

“We’ll help you out here,” Reggie says, bumping his shoulder with Munroe’s. “I probably know it a lot better than any classroom in this place.”

“Cheryl and I can look into the detention room,” Toni says. She looks around the rest of their little group. “Uh, Ethel? Wanna come help us?”

“Oh,” Ethel says. She looks as surprised as Archie feels at the suggestion. “Yeah, sure.”

“Betty and I will check the trophy cases,” Veronica says, quickly enough that it almost makes Archie suspicious that she’s trying to avoid him. If that is the case, he hardly blames her—being trapped in banal conversation with her as they search some dark corner of Riverdale High sounds like a nightmare to him too.

As for Betty’s part, perhaps the conditioning that comes from three years of following Veronica’s bullheaded lead in high school never leaves you, because she looks less surprised than Archie thought she might be. “That leaves Archie and Jughead to the storage closet. You guys alright with that?”

It’s not a real question—everyone’s falling into ranks, he could hardly disagree now—but Archie almost wants to treat it as one. _Is_ he okay with this?

He’d meant it earlier, when he’d apologized for his absence in his friends’ lives, and that hadn’t excluded Jughead. In fact, Archie’s neglect had perhaps been the most glaring with him. It was similar, maybe, to how his and Veronica’s relationship buckled under the strain of transition, but somehow, this loss hurt even worse. Sometimes, Archie thought back on the idle daydream he’d once embarrassingly even gone so far as to voice to Jughead: the two of them living together somewhere in New York, Veronica and Betty out of frame but close by. In his head, it had the warm vignette of a sitcom holiday special; they were together, they were laughing, it was altogether happier than Archie could ever picture himself now.

Of course, now Archie realizes this for the childish imagining it had been—you don’t live with your childhood friends forever, in fact, you barely even manage to stay in touch for a few years after high school. The language you’ve both spoken fluently since you learned how to talk to another person is exchanged for silences neither of you can make the first step to fill. And you miss them—a lot. Frankly, Archie thinks, it sucks.

“Yeah,” Jughead says, drawing him out of his thoughts. “That’s fine.” Archie hopes it isn’t resentment he’s hearing in Jughead’s voice, but he’s afraid it might be.

He nods. “I’m ready whenever you guys are.”

“Okay then,” Betty says. “I’ll see everyone back here in an hour.” She glances around with a determined look in her eye that Archie’s always admired. “Good luck.”

***

It’s not exactly Ethel’s _first_ choice to strike out with Cheryl and Toni, but she supposes it could be worse. Namely, playing witness to Betty and Jughead’s forty-seventh breakdown break up fight while patrolling the site of possibly the worst four years of her life for bombs whose timers ticking closer and closer to zero.

So yeah, maybe she’ll take an hour of hanging out with two of the weirdest lesbians she’s ever met instead.

“I’m thinking we case the whole room,” Toni says, drawing her fingers in a rectangle to indicate the perimeter of the detention hall, “and go from any clues we find there. Oh, and I guess we should also probably crack open this desk, right? Ethel, you got a bobby pin?”

“Hm?” Ethel says from where she’s looking at the various initials sketched into the windowsill. No EM’s yet—maybe she’ll take two minutes and be the first. “Oh, no, sorry, I don’t really put anything in my hair since, you know,” she pulls on one of her short curls to indicate the change in length.

“Oh, right,” Toni says. She smiles. “It looks great, by the way. This is like, super cliche to say, but being out of Riverdale looks good on you.”

“Oh, thanks,” Ethel says. She’s never been quite sure how to accept a complement given so freely like that, but she’s trying to get better at it. “Yeah, college was—it was a lot easier to do a lot of things once I was away. How about you guys, have you been out of town then, or…?”

“Briefly,” Toni says and elbows Cheryl. “But we came back here afterwards because _some_ one missed her mansion.”

“It’s hardly my fault that the housing market in the Greater Antilles is somehow even worse than this blip on the map,” Cheryl says with a sniff.

“There was that one with the—”

“It didn’t even have _columns_ , Toni,” Cheryl huffs. “I don’t know about you, but _I_ for one am living in a post-Renaissance age.”

“Okay, okay,” Toni says, hands up. She looks to Ethel in a sort of commiserating way, an _oh boy_ written on her face. Ethel smiles back, a bit jealous, but happy enough for them and their weird knowledge of each other. “Dating an heiress is nice for the bills, but wow, I barely know what she’s talking about sometimes.”

“I told you, learning about salad versus dinner forks is really not that hard,” Cheryl says, but she smiles over her shoulder at Toni.

“But you still refuse to learn to use chopsticks.”

“They’re not suited to my delicate hands!”

Toni laughs. “Hey, how about you, Ethel? Dating any like, foreign princes who insist totaling a personalized sports car is just part of growing up?”

Ethel instantly gets nervous in a way she’s almost getting tired of. “I’ve actually,” she starts, then shakes her head. “I’m gay, actually—this haircut isn’t just for show, ha. But no, no foreign princesses or anything.”

“Oh,” Toni says with a little quirk to her mouth. “Hey, thanks for telling us.”

“No problem, I guess,” Ethel says. “I’m, uh, trying to make it less of a big deal now that I’ve got all the big coming outs out of the way.”

“Well, let me be the first to welcome you to the sapphic sisterhood,” Cheryl says. Ethel privately wonders if she’s got a list of alliterations like that written down somewhere. “But—”

“Babe,” Toni starts.

“Why’d you wait?” Cheryl says. “I mean, I’d understand if you were the only one in our school, but I was already out.” She smiles with teeth. “That trail had thoroughly been blazed.”

“Uh,” Ethel says. She sits back, resting on the edge of the window. “Cheryl, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but being gay is like, the only thing we have in common.”

“How so?” Cheryl says, head tilted in a way that’s always reminded Ethel of some kind of bird of prey.

Ethel laughs a little, but sobers when Cheryl doesn’t join in. “Well,” she says, squinting up at the ceiling. “The mansions thing, for one—I’m going to be paying off my student loans for the next couple of decades, with zero help from my parents. I mean, I can’t really ask a man who tried to kill himself over financial problems when I was fifteen to shoulder another burden, right?” She abruptly becomes aware that she’s probably oversharing and switches topic. “Also, uh, look at us. No offense, but everything is a lot more—palatable when the person doing it is one hundred pounds and gorgeous.”

“Wow,” Toni says. “I had no idea you were going through all that in high school. Not to be reductive or anything, but that _sucks_ , dude.”

Ethel laughs, briefly thinking about bringing up the fact it wasn’t for lack of her trying to talk about her problems with anyone. After quickly doing the mental math, she figures it won’t help her look any less pathetic. “Yeah, well,” she says, looking down to halfheartedly examine the contents of one of the desks. “At some point it was easier to just get really, _really_ into RPG than focus on my real life, you know? Even if it meant spending a lot of time with Jughead.”

A sudden hand on her arm makes her jump. She looks up to see Cheryl, more solemn than Ethel’s ever seen her.

“We had incredibly different lives back then,” Cheryl says. “But I know, better than anyone on this planet, what it’s like to have a shitty home life.”

Ethel is suddenly uncomfortable. “I don’t really think my situation compares—”

“And I’m sorry,” Cheryl continues, not giving so much as an outward twitch to display she’s even heard Ethel speak, “that I couldn’t—that I didn’t do anything to help you back then.”

For several beats, Ethel can’t do anything but look at her. Cheryl has always been striking, even discounting just how much pageantry she’s capable of; being the subject of her rapt attention had been the topic of some of Ethel’s literal nightmares in high school. But now, in the darkened hollow of the detention hall, she seems—softer isn’t the word exactly, but it’s what immediately springs to Ethel’s mind. Her eyes are kinder, like perhaps somewhere in the years between now and when Ethel knew her, she’s been able to deconstruct some of the anger that kept her alive in high school. It might just be Ethel projecting, but she hopes, for both her and Cheryl’s sake, that she’s got the right idea.

Toni rolls her eyes with a smile. “Yeah, sorry, now that we’re going to an actual therapist Cheryl’s been really into the reparations step of things.”

“You can’t tell me you don’t feel better too,” Cheryl says, and like a switch, she’s back into her unbreakable default mode. She takes a deep breath in and out, raising lowering her hands with it. “Like Dr. Amber says: the tension—is released.”

“Wait sorry,” Ethel says. “Actual therapist?”

“Oh yeah,” Toni says. “Turns out there are like, so many cults in Riverdale.”

“Aw, babe,” Cheryl says, a beatific smile on her face as she leans into Toni. “I thought you looked cute in the blood dark cowl.”

A laugh bursts from Ethel before she can control it. “Sorry, sorry, I just—” She dissolves into laughter again, waving her hands to try and convey a lack of malice. Luckily, Cheryl and Toni don’t seem to mind that she finds lesbian therapy of the damned funny and even join in a little themselves.

“Oh man,” Toni says, tilting her head back. “Say what you will about this place, but hell, it really isn’t all bad.” Despite what she would have said merely an hour ago, Ethel finds she doesn’t disagree.

“Hey,” she says, an idea occurring to her. “You guys wanna do something fun?”

***

Jughead’s not annoyed. He’s not.

It’s something he’s been trying to work on ever since Tiff from his short-lived college newspaper job told him shortly that, if he was always so irritated with the people around him, was it _maybe_ possible the fault didn’t actually lie with them? Then again, was he really comfortable taking advice from someone who went by Tiff?

“Are you sure it’s down this hallway? We’ve been walking for a while,” Archie says. Jughead continues to not be annoyed, despite the way he can feel his jaw clenching.

“Yes, Archie, I’m sure,” he says. “Unless they’ve played Rubik's Cube with the school layout in the past five years, I’m pretty sure I know how to get to a place where I lived in for several weeks.”

“You—oh,” Archie says. He’s quiet for a second. “Oh, yeah.”

Jughead laughs a little against his will; it comes out bitter. “Yeah.”

Blessedly, for a few moments, it’s quiet as they walk down the halls. Jughead’s halfway to forming a maybe-decent thing to say to Betty after they regroup when Archie’s voice interrupts him again.

“Hey, I didn’t mean to bring up any—bad memories,” Archie says, clearly uncomfortable. “I’m sorry if I ever, you know, go too far or something.”

Jughead snorts, but it doesn’t do much to cover up the rush of guilt he suddenly feels. No one is quite as adept at offering himself up on an altar as Archie. Instead of embarrassing himself further by apologizing, though, he doubles down. “What, are you going to ix-nay talking about high school at all, then? We would have nothing to say to each other.”

“Apparently we already don’t,” Archie says under his breath. It’s easy for Jughead to pretend not to hear as they finally round a corner and see the door to the old storage room. It’s a little bit harder to tell himself it doesn’t hurt.

“My home away from home,” he says, rummaging in his pockets for his wallet for a gift card or something to ruin as he jimmies the lock, but Archie’s already reaching for the handle, which slides like butter underneath his large footballer’s hands. They stare at each other for a second.

“It shouldn’t be open,” Archie says slowly. “Right? I mean, the janitors definitely kept it locked when we were in school.”

Jughead nods, furrowing his brow. “They did,” he mutters. “The question is begged: were they the last people to open it?” An unbidden chill runs down Jughead’s spine at his own words, and by the look in Archie’s eyes, he’s not alone. Uneasily, they push forward into the room.

It’s mostly how Jughead remembers it, which he tries not to do often. The tiny room had served him adequately during the strange interim days between the drive-in and his brief stay at the Andrews’, but it was never anything to miss. The constant creaking from the stairs above him and faint worry of asbestos had never quite let him get a solid night’s sleep, not that hiding in the school was conducive to one anyway. He had missed his drive-in bed, even fantasized about returning to his dad’s trailer, but his pride had disallowed it. He’d barely been able to stomach the prospect of the Andrews’ house, and that had been a setting of his fantasies since before he could remember.

No family in Riverdale is perfect, but the Andrews had probably had the closest run at it. Despite the divorce that had hung over Archie’s head in high school, the Andrews’ house stood otherwise untainted. As a kid, Jughead had used to imagine what it might be like to live in those hallowed halls, what it might be like to live a normal life.

It’s odd—he’d never really attempted to picture his own family in place of the Andrews’, but rather just himself slotted in beside them. Just an extra space set out for him at dinnertime, a bed alongside Archie’s own. As he’d gotten older, the fantasy morphed to a separate room, and even stretched so far to include FP, who would somehow have mended his grievances with Fred and returned to their friendly rhythms, the same ones their sons observed together.

The Andrews’ home had always seemed—safe. Untouchable, almost, the way Betty’s life had appeared until they’d all gotten much too close a glance at exactly how much of a disaster it actually was. But unlike her own, Archie’s family had possessed little in the way of deep dark hidden secrets. They’d just—loved each other, and cared for each other like families were supposed to. It had been so unfair, Jughead thinks for the millionth time, that Fred Andrews was the unlucky one to die in the drive-by shooting that night, unfair that it had been Archie who’d had to hold himself together throughout the aftermath. Perhaps there’s a price to a happy family life, a price that gets paid in blood.

Jughead is too deep in thought to fully pay attention to his surroundings and the severe slope of the ceiling catches him off guard. He bumps his head with a resounding thunk.

“Shit,” he says, rubbing the injury. It hurts, but worse is the humiliation of doing it in front of another person. It’s Archie, though, and he’s never really counted toward embarrassment.

“You okay?” Archie says. Before Jughead can respond, he takes a step closer to squint at Jughead’s forehead in the dim light. Archie’s hand lightly encircles Jughead’s own wrist to draw it away from his head. Jughead abruptly feels the lack of space available in the closet as Archie’s face stops a hair’s breadth away from his own. Archie scrutinizes for a moment and then grins. “I think you’re fine—too bad you don’t still wear that beanie, huh? Cushioning, or whatever.”

Jughead finds himself smiling back. “Too bad you don’t still wear that letterman jacket, huh?” he says. At Archie’s questioning look, he punches him in the shoulder. “Cushioning, or whatever.”

It’s good to see Archie’s responding laugh, but the feeling only lasts a second—Jughead is suddenly hit with a wave of regret. It’s been entirely too long since he had a moment of this simple joking with anyone, but Archie especially. It’s made worse by the knowledge that it’s entirely his fault they fell out of touch.

Archie’s smile abruptly becomes too much to look at and Jughead averts his gaze, clearing his throat. “Alright,” he says. The sooner they’re out of an enclosed space together the better. “See any—bombs?”

“No,” Archie says. “Then again, I’m not totally sure I know what we’re looking for.”

“Uh, wires, lights,” Jughead says, though he doesn’t really know the specifics either. “Well, actually—you’ve seen bombs, right? Army man?” He looks up when Archie fails to respond.

“Oh, uh,” Archie says. He’s avoiding eye contact. “Yeah, you’re about right. Pipe bombs—if that’s what they used—are,” he holds up his hands to approximate the size, “and made of—pipes.”

“Thanks,” Jughead says, voice dry. “Let me know if you think of any other,” he waves a hand, “key tidbits.”

“What’s that mean?” Archie says. Jughead looks up to see Archie looking at him with his eyebrows drawn.

“C’mon Arch,” Jughead says. “You always were more of the action hero type. Leave the sleuthing to me and Betty.”

Archie looks at him a few moments more—long enough that Jughead begins to feel the stirrings of guilt—and then glances down and away. “Right.”

The pit of Jughead’s stomach sours. “Hey, I didn’t—”

“Shut up.”

“Okay, sorry, I just wanted—” Jughead starts to say, but Archie shushes him again, his eyes focused beyond the open door of the storage closet.

“I think,” Archie says, his voice dropped to a very slight whisper, “there’s someone out there.”

A prickle runs down Jughead’s arms as he listens very intently. He’s about to tell Archie it was probably nothing when he hears it, very far away but getting closer: footsteps.

“Close the door,” he hisses. “Close it!”

Archie rushes to do so, and soon the only thing illuminating their faces are the small rectangles of light slanting through the gaps in the grill at the bottom of the door. Neither of them goes for their phone flashlights, the terror of being found by this unknown variable too strong for that.

Jughead is so straining to hear the footsteps as they get closer that it takes him longer than it should to realize Archie is no longer standing beside him. He’s slid down the wall to sit with his arms braced over his knees, head bowed so Jughead can’t see his face.

“Archie?” Jughead says. “Are you—” Just then, Archie draws in a deep shuddering breath that almost sounds like a sob. He draws a few more, concerning in their loudness, before he’s able to speak.

“I’m fine,” he says, but his voice breaks. “I just,” another deep breath, “I need a second.”

It’s almost more horrifying than the footsteps in the hallway, to see Archie reduced to this. High school had contained too many events that had strung them out thin, pushed them to emotional limits, but Jughead has never seen Archie look quite like he does now. Then again, maybe this had been common and Jughead just hadn’t been unlucky enough to see it. After all, they’d both found new partners in crime to confide in by senior year. The idea of Veronica comforting Archie through what seems like a panic attack like this somehow leaves Jughead feeling even more disconcerted.

“Hey,” he says, kneeling down beside Archie. “It’s alright—I mean, probably, could be a crazed bomber prowling the halls. Or Cheryl, not sure which is worse.” A laugh breaks through Archie’s current heaving breath, which strikes Jughead as a good thing, but then he quickly returns to his pattern. “Shit, okay, what do you need me to do?”

“Just—sit there,” Archie says. “I gotta breathe.”

Sitting next to Archie’s laborious breathing, Jughead feels useless, and then angry at himself for feeling so. Even as a kid, his lame attempts to comfort Jellybean had gone better than this.

Driven by a combination of desires—to quiet Archie down and offer some kind of comfort—Jughead throws an arm around his hunched shoulders and squeezes as tight as he. Bracing. He feels Archie start against him, but after a moment, it seems to work.

He can only lose himself in relief for a moment though, because as soon as Archie’s breathing quiets, the footsteps pass through their part of the hall. Jughead’s breath stutters in his chest as an eerie sort of light passes with the sound.

“Did you see that?” he whispers almost directly into Archie’s ear after he’s waited as long as he’s able for the footsteps to recede down the hall.

“What?” Archie says, looking up. His eyes are slightly unfocused and his brow glistening with sweat. With his head raised, Jughead registers again how close they’ve become. This time, however, he’s unable to move himself away.

“The—never mind,” Jughead says. “Are you—?”

“Oh—yeah,” Archie says, breaking out of Jughead’s grip to wipe his face with his hands. “God, I’m sorry.” He gets to his feet in a quick but surprisingly quiet motion and reaches for the door handle. “Let’s get out of here.”

Jughead’s about to warn him against it when Archie pauses with his hand on the knob all on his own. Thinking he’s heard something else, Jughead stills from his position on the floor and strains his ears. The only thing he hears is the jiggling of the handle—for an icy second, he thinks it’s coming from the outside—but soon realizes it’s just Archie.

“I think it’s locked,” Archie says. “Or stuck—is there a latch somewhere?”

“Not that I remember,” Jughead says, getting to his feet. “But they might have replaced it since I lived here. Let me see.” A different kind of icy dread flows through him when he realizes there’s no visible turning lock on the inside of the knob—merely a small ragged keyhole. “I can’t fucking believe this.”

“We can’t unlock it?” Archie says.

“Not unless you’ve been moonlighting as the Riverdale High janitor,” Jughead says. “Or you’ve got, I don’t know, a crowbar?”

“We are in an equipment storage closet,” Archie says. He huffs out a laugh. “Sorry I just—” He waves a hand, leaving his statement unfinished. Somehow, Jughead still understands what he means.

“Yeah,” Jughead says. He slumps back down to sit against the wall, looking up at Archie with half smile. “At least there’s no bomb in here.”

“That we know of,” Archie says, and smiles back.

There’s a moment of silence that for the first time in this strange night, Jughead doesn’t worry about filling.

“Hey,” Archie says. “As long as we’re in here—I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Jughead says, honestly confused. “Your,” he cuts himself off, unsure of what to call what he’s just witnessed, “whatever?”

Archie smiles a little at that. “Not what I meant, but yeah, that too,” he says. “But no, I’m sorry that we haven’t spoken in—a while.”

The guilt is back. “It’s not your fault,” Jughead says before Archie can go on. “Archie—it’s not.”

“Isn’t it?” Archie says. He sighs. “I know it’s—listen, when I finally got out of Riverdale, I just wanted to leave all this stuff behind me, you know?” Jughead nods. He does. “And at the time, if I had to sacrifice my best friend to escape, I was okay with that.” It hurts, but Jughead gets it. Archie’d lost his dad, his freedom, any sense of safety or security. It’s amazing that he’s still standing at all; Jughead doesn’t begrudge him anything he felt he had to do to get into a better place.

“I understand,” Jughead says.

“No, you don’t,” Archie says, looking frustrated. “I’m not—I’ve never been good with words like you are, I don’t know how to—” He lets out a breath. “I was okay with it back then, but—I’m not anymore.”

Jughead looks up at him, a bit puzzled. “What does that mean?”

“It means I miss you,” Archie says. The half-smile that reappears on his face is like a lance through Jughead’s side—maybe it missed the most vital bits and left him alive but breathing sure is a lot more painful now. “And I wish—I wish we could have stayed friends.”

Jughead lets out a breath and looks down, away from the openness of Archie’s face. “Do you remember sophomore year?”

“Sure,” Archie says, indulging the subject change. “Hard to forget.”

“Right,” Jughead says. “Do you—well, probably not, but there was that time we had to drive to Greendale to—”

“The,” Archie pauses, “drug stuff, yeah.”

The fact that after all they’ve seen, Archie Andrews still manages to look uncomfortable when the time they ran drugs together is brought up makes Jughead smile. “You brought up something on our trip over there,” he says. He takes a breath, trying his best to repay Archie’s vulnerability with some of his own. “Something I think about when I feel like—I don’t know, when I feel like things are going wrong. Which,” he laughs a little, “is kind of a lot recently.”

“What is it?” Archie says. His voice is quiet, kind. Jughead wants to tell him anything, everything.

“You and me,” Jughead says. “Somewhere in New York City. East Village, right? Wherever, we’re there and we’re—happy.” A type of happiness Jughead’s not even sure he’s capable of anymore.

“Yeah,” Archie says, faintly. “Yeah, I remember.”

“Do—do you ever think about that anymore?”

“Jughead,” Archie says with a serious expression, “I think about that all the time.”

“Yeah. Yeah, me too.”

It should be embarrassing—clinging onto the same fantasy for eight years? Who does that? But instead, Jughead feels nothing but relief. Relief, and the ignition of something he faintly remembers the edges of. It’s almost—

“Do you hear that?” Archie says, shattering Jughead’s thoughts. He listens, expecting to hear the footsteps from before or perhaps even something worse, but instead—familiar voices.

“Veronica?”

“And Betty,” Archie grins, then pounds the side of his fist against the door. “Hey guys, in here!”

***

“Go long!” Reggie says without even a hint of irony in his voice as he sends the football soaring over folding tables into Munroe’s arms. Raiding the gym utility closet had seemed like a good idea at first, but after finding copious sports equipment and zero bombs, Kevin’s less sure.

“ _Tight_ spiral there Reg,” Munroe says. Kevin feels abducted.

“Hey, guys,” Kevin says. “Not to put a damper on things here, but—do you think we should maybe keep looking somewhere?”

Reggie shrugs, arms over his head for Munroe’s next pass. “No bombs in here,” he says. “I’d say our work is done.”

Kevin isn’t sure what his expression looks like when he looks to Munroe to appeal for help, but Reggie’s fiancé just laughs. “C’mon, Kev,” Munroe says. “The rest of them have it handled. Football?” He mimes a throw Kevin’s way.

“No thanks,” Kevin says. He leans against one of the tables for a second, thinking. “So, you guys are totally cool if we all just—explode.”

“I mean, the parking lot is right there,” Reggie says, pointing at gym’s side doors. “I’m pretty sure we could make it—but we won’t have to. Betty’s got it handled.”

“Betty?” Kevin says.

“Mm,” Munroe says, shaking his head. “You’re crazy if you think this is a Betty problem. This has Cheryl written all over it.”

“Bombs, though?” Reggie says. “Nah, my money’s still on Betty.”

“Wait— _wait_ ,” Kevin says. “You’d rather sit in here, throwing a football around, and hypothesize over whose undead parent, or twin, or long-lost brother planned this whole thing than actually do anything to help?”

For a moment, no one says anything. Then, Reggie scoffs.

“Obviously,” he says with a grin.

“Sorry man,” Munroe says. “But have _you_ learned about any serial killer relatives in the past few years? Any twins you didn’t know about?”

“Well, I,” Kevin says, then stops. “No.”

Munroe smiles. “You’re probably in the clear. Cheryl, on the other hand.” He lets out a low whistle.

“I’m telling you, it’s Betty,” Reggie says. “Disguised voice? Bomb threats? It’s gotta be her dad.”

“You guys are insane,” Kevin says. He pauses. “Besides, if there was ever anyone who’d inspire a villain to take control of a high school reunion, it’d be Archie.”

Reggie crows and smacks the football with his right hand. “He’s got us, man,” he says to Munroe. “Hey, maybe I should marry Kevin instead, huh?”

Kevin is instantly on alert, but Munroe just walks calmly up to Reggie and then, before Kevin can blink, has him slung across his shoulders in a friendly sort of fireman’s carry.

“Sure,” Munroe says, unfairly not out of breath. “Go ahead and try it.”

“Aw, babe,” Reggie says, laughing from his position on Munroe’s back.

“You guys couldn’t have been like this when we were in high school?” Kevin says, but it’s more dry than bitter. With everything that happened those five years ago and beyond, he doesn’t blame them for not being able to focus on this aspect of themselves for long enough to glean anything significant.

“Nah, sorry Kev,” Reggie says. “I was waiting for the right man to come along.”

“Well, gross, not at all what I was implying,” Kevin says, but he’s smiling. “But I’m happy for you.”

“Thanks,” Munroe says, then tilts his head in Reggie’s direction in a slightly weighty fashion.

Reggie groans. “No.”

“C’mon, it’s Kevin.”

“What’s Kevin?” Kevin says, getting the sinking feeling he’s about to have to decline a threesome invitation. Or accept, who knows? It’s Riverdale.

“We compromised,” Reggie says, looking very serious for someone whose face is beginning to turn red from hanging upside-down. “We’d have the reception at Pop’s as long as the guest list was less than 50 people.”

“We both know Chisholm’s gonna flake,” Munroe says. He shakes Reggie a little. “C’mon, it’ll be fun to have more people with high school stories.”

Reggie appears to think it over. “Fine,” he says, letting out a sigh. “Kevin, you got plans the 25th of May?”

Kevin smiles. “Not anymore.”

***

Looking at the ancient trophy cases, Veronica finds herself half-wishing she was allergic to dust. Unfortunately, the only thing she seems to be having a reaction to right now is proximity to one Betty Cooper. Not that Betty is doing anything particularly incendiary; on the contrary, she seems to be avoiding any extra contact with Veronica, or any contact at all. She glances at her sparingly and Veronica wants to scream.

“You check in that classroom,” Betty says with barely a flick of the eyes in her direction. “I’ll get the two on this side.”

“Aye aye, Captain Cooper,” Veronica says, the bitterness in her voice going undisguised. “Let me know when you have more orders for me to follow.”

Betty lets out a sigh through her nose but doesn’t say anything. The lack of response hurts even worse.

“Listen, if you have something to say,” Veronica says, “by all means, you know there are _no_ secrets between us.”

“Fine,” Betty says, turning to look at her. Veronica thrills but does her best to keep a straight face. “I thought I wouldn’t have to, but fine.”

“Excuse me?”

“I kind of expected the whole,” Betty waves one arm before crossing them again, “ _what are you doing, Betty,_ and _why aren’t you responding, Betty,_ from Jughead, but you,” she says, looking at Veronica with a stare that might unnerve her if she didn’t want it trained on her so bad, “you always seemed to get it.”

“Yeah, in _high school_ , when I saw you every fucking day,” Veronica says. “And besides, it wasn’t exactly hard to keep up to date on Betty Cooper’s crazy life when I could just look at the news and—oh, jailbreak. Oh, her father’s dead—oh, no, now her father’s _really_ dead—”

“I’m not crazy,” Betty says, but her voice is flat rather than annoyed. “And for the last time, yes, my father is really dead.”

“I know you’re not, I—listen,” Veronica says, switching tactics. “I know what it’s like to have a father who wants to ruin your life, and I know the insanity of what we went through, which is why you should have _talked_ to me instead of cutting me off.”

“I didn’t cut you off,” Betty says, but barely seems to be focusing on Veronica as she picks one of the classroom door’s locks.

“Oh, well what would you call it? You stopped answering my calls, moved apartments, you made your mother change her phone number—”

“That was actually unrelated.”

Veronica huffs—she’s not proud of it. “Whatever,” she says. “What was I supposed to think was happening?”

“I,” Betty starts, then stops. It feels nice to get her a little speechless until she shrugs and looks away again. “Veronica, sometimes people just drift apart.”

Veronica is going to smash a window with the point of her Gucci heel. “What are you _talking_ about?” she demands. “Me and, I don’t know, _Ethel_ drifted apart; Betty, we were _best friends_.” The only one Veronica’s ever had.

At last, Betty stops messing with the door lock. “I know,” she says, looking a little guilty. “But did you ever stop to wonder what that even means? We had like, less than nothing in common, and barely even saw each other all of senior year.” She sighed. “It just—it felt like something that was said more than it was actually true.”

Forget the fucking window, Veronica’s the one being shattered. “Speak for yourself,” she says past the horrible lump in her throat. “It was fucking real to me.” Suddenly, being in the same room as Betty is too much, and Veronica opens the now unlocked door and pushes past her into the empty classroom.

“Veronica,” Betty says, following her inside. Veronica whirls on her.

“No, I get it, I do,” she says, not bothering to hide the wobble in her voice. “Don’t bother trying to form a relationship with Veronica, she’s made of, of faberge eggs and fucking,” she gestures down at her dress, “t-shirt boob windows. Nothing that’s goddamn _real_.” She laughs, but it’s the unfortunate kind that brings about the beginning of a true breakdown. “Good, now my make-up’s gonna run. Excellent.”

“Veronica,” Betty says again. There’s something in her voice that makes Veronica look over to her despite the embarrassment of tears on her face. “I didn’t—I don’t mean it like that. You’re—as real as anyone.”

“Sure,” Veronica says, hunting down a tissue box on the desk at the front of the room and wiping her face. “Just not real enough to warrant a place in Betty Cooper’s inner circle.”

Betty looks pained. “It wasn’t about you,” she says. “It was—out of my control.”

Veronica laughs again, only a little hiccupy. “Bullshit,” she says. “Nothing’s ever out of your control—even if it was, since when have you ever had a problem breaking the rules?”

“It was important,” Betty says, “besides, I—I didn’t realize it would hurt you this much.”

“Of course it would hurt me!” Veronica says, waving handfuls of eyeliner smeared tissue around. “Listen, Archie was great, but I’ve had plenty of boyfriends before.” She takes a breath, aware that she’s about to give too much away. “But best friends? I’ve never, ever had anyone like you—before or since. So you’ll excuse me if I was a little stung.”

Betty stares at her, eyes wide in the way Veronica has missed. Anyone who doesn’t know her might liken the expression to that of a baby deer, or some other innocent woodland animal. Veronica knows better.

When Betty fails to say anything, Veronica rolls her eyes and consciously begins to put her armor back on. “Listen, you don’t have to say anything,” she says as she wipes her eyes a final time. “I know I’m being insane, I just—God, you pissed me off.”

“I’m sorry,” Betty says. Her tone has a quality that puts Veronica on edge in what she’s not sure is a good way. “I didn’t know what I was doing back then, but I do now.”

That’s all the warning Veronica has before Betty is in right front of her, eyes burning with an intensity that strikes a familiar chord; Veronica barely has time to register this before Betty is—kissing her.

Veronica makes a noise—probably unflattering—before settling her hands on Betty’s hips and leaning in. Betty’s lips are slightly chapped, but the way she bites on Veronica’s bottom lip and presses in closer to her is—Veronica can do nothing but cling to her.

Betty breaks the kiss first, pulling back to mouth at the junction of Veronica’s jaw. Veronica breathes out like a shot.

“Betty,” she says. “Betty, I—” She remembers, wildly, their kiss during cheerleading tryouts, how she’d felt regret and giddiness in equal measure for an entire week afterward. What an idiot, she thinks at her past self.

Betty pulls back and Veronica is distracted for a moment by the redness of her mouth before finally managing to look her in the eye. The expression there makes her stomach freeze over. She shoves Betty away.

“Stop,” Veronica says. “I don’t—not like this.”

“What?” Betty says, halfway to hurt. Veronica soldiers on.

“This way you get sometimes,” Veronica says, unable to make eye contact. “This, I don’t know, darker persona, or whatever. I don’t want that.”

“It’s not a persona,” Betty says, and reaches for her again. “Veronica—”

“Okay,” Veronica says, stepping neatly out of the way. “But I think you—play it up, when you’re not sure about something. I think it’s easier for you to lean into that part of yourself when you’re not sure about something.” She hugs her arms around herself. “And I—I can’t be something you’re not sure about, Betty.”

“And what? This is all my fault?”

Veronica rolls her eyes. “No, Saint Betty,” she says, “but you were in high school with Archie and I; we stayed together through my dad framing him for murder, through him playing Keanu Reeves to Jughead’s River Phoenix and camping in the wilderness while on the goddamn _run_. I’m a ride or die kind of bitch.”

Betty smiles a bit at that, unknowledgeable to how Veronica’s heart twists at the sight. “Yeah,” she says. “I guess you are.”

“So, I can’t do this unless you’re sure about it,” Veronica says. She hesitates. “Are you?” Betty’s quick glance away is damning. Veronica sighs. “Yeah, okay. I should have known.”

“Veronica,” Betty says, but fails to follow it up with anything.

“No, I get it,” Veronica says, and she does. She understands the way Betty is clearly unwilling to give up the way she sees herself for Veronica, unwilling to become someone who can be predicted. Veronica herself had also once felt the comfort of looking at her closest friends and thinking, _none of these people really know who I am._ Now, though, she longs for nothing more than to be recognized. “It’s fine—really, Betty. Let’s just keep looking.”

Thankfully, their slow wandering of the classroom and then hall is only painfully quiet for a few minutes. Veronica’s head shoots up so fast she feels a twinge in her neck when she hears the echoing sound of a locker slam from down a distant hallway. She looks to Betty, only to find her already staring intently at her. With a nod, they both walk as quickly and quietly as they can towards the sound.

“Was this it?” Veronica says, gesturing towards a cracked open locker door they’ve reached after walking a minute or two. They’re at the end of a hallway with a large window overlooking some kind of crop field. “Could this and the, I don’t know, air flow make a sound like we heard?”

Betty shakes her head slowly. “That had to be a person,” she says. “We already know someone has orchestrated this whole thing, why wouldn’t they be here to make sure their crazed experiment goes successfully?”

“Right,” Veronica says. “Why wouldn’t they be in the building they rigged to blow?” Betty shoots her a halfhearted glare before something catches her eye and her spine straightens. “What?”

Instead of responding, Betty moves slowly towards the window. Veronica follows.

“Look.”

“What—oh,” Veronica says. For a moment, she struggles to find something to say. “Is that—”

Betty nods. “It is.”

Stretching out below them, partially concealed by trees surrounding the field they’re engraved into, is several interlocking shapes and lines, spelling out something in a language Veronica doesn’t know. Crop circles.

“Well,” Veronica says, a little weakly. “At least now we know my father’s not involved.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading, just so you know any inconsistency in my writing or something you think was poorly done was actually on purpose as a love letter to the show. Checkmate
> 
> Also if you’re wondering why there’s no Betty POV, uh, like I can try and write what’s going on in her head? Yeah right


	3. Chapter 3

“Wait,” Reggie says. “Why would aliens wanna bomb our high school reunion?”

The view of the crop circles is slightly better from the school’s side parking lot, but the night chill in the air makes Jughead wonder if their relocation was worth it.

“It’s not aliens,” Betty says, not looking up from her phone.

“It’s not?” Archie says.

“So quick to dismiss what you don’t understand,” Jughead says. He’s still slightly rattled from their failed bomb search, so the introduction of aliens to their insane evening is actually a welcome change. “Space is infinite; if there is another intelligent world out there that chose to contact ours, why not start in Riverdale?”

“You know,” Munroe says. “There was that thing, a few years back, the rocket?” He shrugs. “Maybe someone actually shot it off and something intercepted.”

“What’d we miss?” Toni says, finally arriving with the other two members of her group in tow. “What’s the—whoa, wait, is that what I think it is?”

“Hold on, did you guys come from outside?” Jughead says. He tries to remember where they were sent to look. “Was there some clue in the other parking lot?”

“What?” Ethel says. “Oh, no, don’t worry about it.” She shares a quick smile with Cheryl and Toni. “It’s—unrelated.”

“Whatever,” Jughead says; he does not have time to care about that vagary. “We should go down to the field to investigate—these events are probably linked.”

There are a few nods throughout the group of them gathered in the darkened parking lot.

“I’m with Jughead,” Archie says. Jughead burns but manages to nod his thanks. “Who’s coming with me?”

“Hate to sound like a broken record,” Kevin says, “but I’m good here.”

“I told you,” Betty says. “It’s not aliens.”

“Betty’s right,” Veronica says. Her voice startles Jughead; she’s been uncharacteristically quiet, leaning against the wall somewhere behind most of the group. “We should still be focusing on the real threat. You know, the one that’s gonna kill us all in,” she checks her phone, “an hour and thirteen minutes?”

Betty looks to her in thanks, but Veronica’s staring at the concrete by her feet. Jughead has half a mind to ask if something happened during their search, but the idea of having to field the question himself gives him pause.

“Even if it’s not aliens,” Jughead says, injecting as much disbelief as he possibly can into his words, “you’re saying that we, what? Ignore it?”

Betty rolls her eyes. “Yeah, Jughead, let’s ignore it—in fact, let’s all just go home, why don’t we?”

“Guys,” Archie says. “Can we do this later?”

“Or not at all,” Veronica says. Jughead and Betty share a scowl, but nod. “Great. Anything to get this night over with sooner. You were saying something, Betty?”

“Like I said, this isn’t aliens,” Betty says. “It’s a message, sure, but—you guys remember the ciphers the Black Hood used?”

“So, what, our lead theory is your dad—back from the dead a second time—trampled some crops in a pretty, let’s all just admit it, phallic pattern?” Cheryl says, nudging Toni with her shoulder. “And to think, we almost didn’t come to this.”

“No,” Betty says. Jughead is almost certain her glare at Cheryl is less venomous than the one he received. “I’m saying that these patterns are probably a code of some sort; they’re trying to communicate something.”

“Like what?” Toni says. “Is it the same cipher as the Black Hood?”

Betty shakes her head. “I don’t think so.”

They all take a moment to look at the symbols. Jughead is entirely too conscious of their time counting down.

“Wait,” Archie says. “I think I know what this is.”

“You—do?” Kevin says. “No offense.”

“Yeah, I had to retake the military symbols test twice,” Archie says, pointing at the sketch Betty’s made. “That symbol means artillery—the bombs, maybe? And that one—it means command center.”

“Okay,” Cheryl says. “Round of applause for army boy, but what does that mean?”

Archie shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says, forehead creased in a frown. He suddenly looks much older than his 23 years. “I don’t even know if that’s right.”

“More than we had a few minutes ago,” Jughead says, and is gratified by the smile Archie shoots him.

“No, that’s good,” Betty says. “Command center—a clue to where the person on the intercom is?”

“Right,” Veronica says. “So what’s the command center of Riverdale?”

“Depends on who we’re talking about,” Jughead says drily. “Bar, convent—jail cell?”

“I get the feeling it’s closer than that; there’s a reason our mysterious voice chose to crash our reunion,” Betty says.

“Command center of Riverdale High?” Archie says, brow furrowed. “That’d be the principal’s office, right?”

“Did anyone happen to look there while we were inside?” Jughead says, feeling the urgency building inside him. When everyone shakes their heads, he springs to his feet. “Archie, you’re a genius.”

“Hell yeah,” Reggie says. “Let’s get back in there and finish this.” He yanks at the side door they’re standing outside of, but it doesn’t budge. “Uh, guys?”

“No one stuck their shoe in it to keep it open?” Kevin says.

“Uh, yeah, sure,” Veronica says. “ _You_ can go ahead and do that; do you see who I’m wearing tonight?”

Archie scratches the back of his neck. “Maybe the front door is still open?”

“Oh my God,” Cheryl says, sitting down with a huff that sends the layers of her dress floating up a little. “I am not walking all the way around in the dark. Harken, for this decrepit stairway is Cheryl Blossom’s final resting place.”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” Betty says. Before anyone can complain any further, she picks up a fist-sized rock from the landscaping and hurls it at the upper window of the door. It smashes inwards, leaving a large ragged hole right above the handle.

“Holy _shit_ ,” Reggie says, laughing.

“What the hell was that?” Jughead says, lowering his arms from where he instinctually brought them up around his head. “We’re damaging school property now?”

“What?” Betty says. “We needed to get inside, the door was in the way, ergo,” she gestures to the hole. “C’mon, we’ve got like an hour left.”

“Betty Cooper,” Veronica says, smiling as she gingerly reaches her hand in past the broken glass to push open the door. “You’re an unstoppable force.”

Jughead has to agree, but for the first—or perhaps thousandth—time, he feels a suspicion that he might not be a match for the exact kind of power Betty wields. When he thinks of the kind of relationship he’s been longing for since he and Betty split, he pictures—well, he feels the same kind of thing he did at age thirteen, longing for the stability of the Andrews’ home life. Something safe. Watching Betty kick the rock she launched through the window back outside, he’s suddenly very aware he won’t find it with her.

“Hey,” Kevin says. He’s the last one left standing outside the door. “I know I haven’t really been the idea guy tonight, but—before we all walk headfirst into this thing, I thought maybe we could have a backup plan?”

***

The idea of a principal’s office has never held much fear for Veronica; even that final year of high school when theirs had seemed actively posed against them, getting in trouble was never anything more than an inconvenience.

Now, facing down the solid wood door, she feels much the same. Any confrontation that’s about to happen cannot possibly be the most traumatic thing to occur tonight. Veronica shakes off a queasy feeling in her stomach.

“Is everybody ready?” Archie says. It’s just the four of them, finally, again, as it always has been.

Veronica catches Archie’s eye and smiles. He smiles back. “Ready,” she says.

“Ready,” Jughead says. He’s looking at Archie too, a thoughtful expression on his face.

“Ready,” Betty says, and pushes open the door.

The office seems to be mostly unchanged, besides the various rearrangements of office furniture that must occur every few years. That, and—

“Daddy?” Veronica says.

On the other side of a dark wood desk stands Hiram Lodge, a small smile on his face that echoes that of the oil portrait that hangs on the wall above him.

“Mija,” he says, spreading his arms. “How nice of you to finally visit.”

“No,” Veronica says. Her queasiness has taken a steep climb straight to nausea. “I’m not speaking to you, what the _fuck_ is going on?”

“Jughead, Archie,” Hiram says. “I wasn’t sure if you’d be here too, but,” his grin widens, “I can’t say I’m surprised.” He nods once. “Miss Cooper.”

“Uh,” Archie says, eyes darting toward the door. “Hi.”

“Mr. Lodge,” Jughead says. “What are you doing here?”

Hiram’s eyes flick towards him for a second before settling back on Veronica. “Why don’t you ask my daughter?”

“As if I have any idea,” Veronica says. It suddenly occurs to her that the others might not believe her. “I swear, I haven’t spoken to him since I was, like, twenty.”

“We believe you,” Betty says. “How about we hear about it from the source—Mr. Lodge?”

Hiram’s smile has slowly gotten smugger, as if their mere presence in his office is making his night. Veronica barely resists storming back through the door.

“If I must,” he says with a put-upon sigh. “As you know, mija, your mother left for the Canadian border after her term ended.”

“Yeah,” Veronica says with as much venom as she can inject into the word. “She sends me weekly emails—she and her new boyfriend are doing well, it seems.”

“But you stayed in town,” Betty says. “Why?”

“Why not?” Hiram leans forward over his desk, a shorter, more devious John F. Kennedy. “There’s always work to be done in Riverdale.”

“Oh,” Archie says. He points at the painting hanging over them. “Are you saying—you’re? Here?”

“Don’t look so surprised,” Hiram says. “Education has always been a passion of mine.” Veronica scoffs.

“What about the bombs?” Betty says, cutting through their odd play at pleasantries. “Why do that? Do you really hate your new job that much?”

“Not at all,” Hiram says. He taps his knuckles on something that upon further examination turns out to be some kind of cheap metal trophy, emblazoned with _Principal of the Year_ at the base. “I just needed to get your attention again, mija.”

“I knew it,” Veronica says, crossing her arms. “The whole thing’s a fake—there are no bombs. It just kills you that I don’t need you in my life anymore.”

“You know that’s not true,” Hiram says.

“No, she’s right,” Archie says, missing the point entirely. Veronica feels a rush of fondness for him. “We didn’t find anything, did we, guys? The bombs must be fake.”

Jughead nods. “It could be—you know what? Let’s go. There’s clearly no threat here.”

“Wait,” Hiram says, a shade of urgency in his voice for the first time since they entered the office. “You found nothing?”

“Nope. We looked everywhere—closets, classrooms, the gym,” Veronica says. She walks to the door and places her hand on the knob. “You know, daddy, the next time you want to talk to me, just go through my lawyer. I’ll mail you her card.”

“No,” Hiram says. He checks his watch and curses. “You don’t—none of you checked the music room? The east stairwell? The _boiler room_? We need to get to the exits, _now_.” He begins to move towards the door, but Betty’s voice stops him cold.

“You get that Kev?” she says, pulling her phone out of her back pocket.

“ _Yeah,_ ” Kevin’s voice comes crackling over the phone. “ _Got all three locations, we’re on it._ ” Hiram looks between them all, brows pinched together.

“You might not be familiar with the idea,” Jughead says, “but unlike you, we don’t have to work alone.”

“Yeah,” Archie says, looking at Jughead. “Everything’s a lot easier when you have—friends. Good friends.” Jughead smiles and Veronica feels like she’s intruding on a private moment. Fortunately, they’re sharing it in a public setting, so she needn’t feel guilty about staring at them.

“I’m glad to see your adolescent bonds are as strong as ever,” Hiram says. His smirk has returned, but a funny part of Veronica feels like he might actually mean it. She’s probably projecting.

“ _Okay, reporting,_ ” Kevin says. “ _Two—no, three, all three. We’ve got all three of the bombs deactivated._ ”

Hiram squints. “It’s been—how did you do it so quickly?”

“ _Oh, yeah, my boyfriend’s this like, coding freak, and—_ ” Betty taps the phone and silences him.

“You’re not the one who’s entitled to questions, Mr. Lodge,” she says.

“Ah, Betty,” Hiram says. “This is a return to form for you, is it not? Bargaining with madmen? How _is_ your father, by the way?”

“Dead,” Betty says, flatly.

Hiram hums. “Of course. Give him my love,” he says, absorbing Betty’s glare with a smile. “Truly, an inspired man—Riverdale feels its loss.”

“Let’s not,” Veronica says in an effort to avoid what has potential to be the most explosive event of the evening. “Daddy, just— _why_?”

His smile changes, somehow. “I’ve already said,” he says with a tilt of his head. “I’ve missed you, mija.”

“And how am I supposed to trust that you don’t have some sort of,” Veronica waves a hand, “insane ulterior motive?”

“I suppose you can’t,” Hiram says. “But I don’t—you have my word as a Lodge.”

“Oh, in that case,” Veronica says drily. She sighs. It’s weird to admit but—she’s missed him too. You don’t go from being your father’s secret weapon to cutting him off cold turkey without aching a little bit for the past. “Fine. You’ll be allowed to follow me again—but I swear, the second you try to set me up with some rich war criminal’s son, I’ll—I’ll fake my own death.”

“That’s all I ask,” Hiram says with a smile. Despite the feeling that she might regret this later, Veronica lets herself smile back.

“I’ve just got one question,” Betty says. “The symbols.”

“What symbols?” Hiram says.

“Don’t play dumb,” Jughead says. “In the field, behind the school.”

“It was kind of like,” Archie draws a few ineffectual lines in the air with his hands, “you know? It’s what led us here.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Hiram says. At their answering expressions, he sighs. “I don’t—how can I convince you that I have too much self-respect to be caught dead trampling grass outside a high school?”

“A Lodge’s word?” Betty says with a wry smile.

“Precisely.”

“Charming as this is,” Veronica says, “if I have to spend another minute in this school, I’d rather we hadn’t defused the bombs. Also, Daddy, bombs? A bit inelegant, don’t you think?”

Hiram laughs a bit. “Ah, Veronica,” he says. “It’s good to have you back.”

“Yeah, well,” she says around the sudden lump in her throat. “Don’t make me regret it.”

The walk out to the parking lot is much less tense than their trek back into the school. When they get there, it’s mostly empty, save for the five or so vehicles Veronica surmises are their own.

“Huh,” Kevin says. “Guess the police never showed up.”

“With the disaster zone that was the sheriff’s office, are you surprised?” Cheryl says. “No offense, Jughead—FP was much better suited as a gang leader.”

“None taken,” Jughead says. “Hey, Arch, you want a ride to Pop’s?” He gestures towards a blue box of a car that has definitely seen better days. Looking at the rearview mirror dice and paint scratches, Veronica ruminates once more on what a shame it is that not everyone can have good taste.

“Oh, uh, sure,” Archie says. “Nice ride, is it—uh.” He stops as they get close enough to see the car clearly in the buzzing parking lot streetlights. Scratched into the already damaged paint are two letters, marring the entire driver’s side door: _EM_.

“What the hell,” Jughead says, dropping to a knee to examine the damage. “What the _hell_ , who did this? Who the fuck is EM?”

Veronica looks up just in time to see Ethel pack away a smirk; she widens her eyes in faux innocence when Veronica makes eye contact. Veronica tries for a stern eyebrow raise, but her mouth is twitching too much to convey anything that actually resembles anger.

“C’mon, Jughead,” she says.

“No, this could be a message,” he says. “Connected to the field, or—”

“I don’t think so,” Archie says, glancing between them all.

“How do you know?”

“No, Jughead’s probably right,” Ethel chimes in with a poorly concealed grin. “Let’s head out to that field!”

Jughead nods and takes a step away from the car, but Archie reels him back in by the back of his jacket.

“C’mon, Jug,” he says. “The detective work can wait, but I’m not so sure about Pop’s milkshakes.”

Jughead seems to struggle with this for a second before giving in. “Fine—but first thing tomorrow!”

“Sure,” Veronica says with a smile and shake of her head. “Tomorrow.”

***

Archie is quiet in his seat next to Veronica in their booth at Pop’s. He can’t help it; he’s bone-tired and there’s something relaxing about letting the voices of his friends wash over him without feeling obligated to chime in.

“Dude,” Reggie says from his booth behind him. Archie turns his head halfway to catch his punch to Kevin’s arm. “You totally saved the day. Fixing a Veronica problem, that’s a big fucking deal!”

“Yeah, but now I have to explain my fucked up high school experience to my boyfriend,” Kevin says, but he’s smiling. “We’d made it two whole years without cults coming up.”

“Well,” Munroe says. “If you can ever convince him to drop by, let him know we’re always trying to get guest teachers at the community center.”

Kevin tilts his head. “I might.”

A screech-like sound brings Archie’s attention to the front of the building, near the bar. His hair stands up until he realizes it’s just Cheryl’s laugh, shameless as ever. She’s leaning over with the force of it, a hand splayed on the arm of a smiling but surprised-looking Ethel. She shoots a questioning look at Toni, who just rolls her eyes with a smile.

“So,” Jughead says, breaking the silence Archie wasn’t even aware had fallen over the booth containing the last four of them. There’s a moment before he speaks again where Archie worries he’s about to bring up something from their past, or try to fight with Betty again. “At least it wasn’t Penelope? I mean,” he taps the table with a loose fist, “I’d feel a lot more nervous drinking these milkshakes.”

Whatever tension was left between the four of them seems to shatter completely as they laugh, somewhat in disbelief.

“Oh God, I know,” Veronica says, taking her hair out of its updo and shaking her head. “But with how insane this night has been, I would almost not be surprised.”

“Maybe we should get them tested,” Betty says, peering suspiciously at her half-finished chocolate milkshake. “I bet Dr. Curdle Jr is still—”

“Oh, shut up, Betty,” Veronica says fondly. “We’d already be dead.”

“I don’t know about that,” Jughead says. “With the evidence of past events—is anyone even sure we _can_ be killed?”

Veronica laughs. “What a twenty-three-year-old thing to say,” she says. “How about it, Archie? How immortal are you feeling?”“Uh, I don’t know,” he says, smiling at them. “But—more than I did yesterday.”

“Aw,” Veronica says, leaning into his shoulder with a laugh. “You big sap.”

“Yeah, what was it you said to Mr. Lodge back there?” Betty says, a teasing lilt to her voice. “‘Everything’s easier with friends?’ We should have left you in the storage closet where we found you—sorry Jughead.”

“Oh, no, I agree,” Jughead says, waving a hand.

“How’d you guys even get stuck in there?” Veronica says.

“Oh it—we heard someone come down the hall and got spooked, I guess,” Jughead says. “In retrospect it was probably just Cheryl.”

“Oh, like she’s not spooky?”

“Yeah, well,” Archie says. His voice sounds too loud to his own ears, but he soldiers on. “That’s—well it’s one way to come out of the closet.” When there’s no response, his heart rate picks up. “What, am I using it wrong?”

“No,” Veronica says slowly. “But Archie, you do know what that means, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I do,” Archie says, looking down at his hands rather than face the expressions that might be on his friends’ faces. “It took me a while to realize—too long, probably—but I’m, I’m gay. Uh, no offense, Veronica.”

“Oh, Archie.” Veronica’s voice so obviously carries a smile that he has to turn to see it. She slings an arm around his waist and squeezes. “I love you.”

“Yeah, Arch,” Betty says, reaching across the table to grab his hand. When he looks, she’s smiling too. “This is hardly the craziest revelation we’ve had tonight.”

Archie smiles back. He has only just worked up the courage to look at the final member of the booth when,

“I have to go,” Jughead says, ducking his head and slipping out of his seat, despite the wide-eyed glare Betty is sending him. “I—I’ll see you guys later.”

“Jughead—” Archie starts, but he’s out the door before he can get much further. Archie stands up and looks imploringly at the women seated beside him. “He’s uh—he’s my ride.”

Veronica lets out a little laugh and waves her hand. “Say no more,” she says. “We get it. Shoo—go fulfill your Taylor Swift music video.”

“Who?” He shakes his head. “Never mind—thank you.”

“You’ve got it,” Betty says. “Now get out of here, Arch.”

With a nod at both of their smiling faces, Archie does.

***

“So,” Veronica says, pointing through the window. “Wanna speculate on what’s happening out there?”

“Stop,” Betty says, but her neck is slightly craned to try and get a better angle of outside the front door. When she can’t, she settles back into her seat with a sigh. “Fine, just a little bit.”

“Oh, good,” Veronica says, rubbing her hands together, which has the unexpected bonus of making Betty laugh and roll her eyes. “Ten bucks says they cash in on those years of high school tension and we go out later to find the car—” She makes a rocking motion with her hand.

“You’re insufferable,” Betty says with a smile. “Those are our friends! They have a lot of things to talk about, probably.” She looks back out the window, considering.

“So you’re taking the bet?” Veronica says. Betty glares at her and she puts her hands up. “What, I’ve got my father’s blood—can’t ignore a sucker deal.”

“Right,” Betty says. “But—no. I’m not taking the bet—how dumb do you think I am?”

Veronica laughs. “Oh, Betty,” she says. It’s sigh-like and wistful in a way she normally wouldn’t tolerate, but she’s tired and Betty has seen all her cards already—knows them by heart, probably. “I’ve missed you.”

Betty’s smile takes on a sadder tinge. “Yeah,” she says. “I’ve missed you too.”

They sit in the relative quiet of a late night at Pop’s for a bit. It’s nice. Even if it’s not everything Veronica could ever want, she thinks that she wouldn’t trade this calm little moment across the booth from Betty for anything in the world. She opens her mouth to say something to that effect when Betty beats her to it.

“What if I wanted to?” Betty says. At Veronica’s blank look, she continues. “What if I wanted to be sure about it.”

“Be sure about what?” Veronica says, but she has an idea. Despite her efforts to tamp it down, hope rises in her stomach.

“There were a lot of ups and downs in high school,” Betty says, eyes shining with intensity. “But the times when I could call you my best friend, they were—they _are_ more important to me than anything.”

Veronica can no longer feel the booth beneath her. It’s not important. “More important than slaying the gargoyle king?” she asks weakly.

Betty smiles a little but continues. “Listen,” she says. “I—want to try with you, I really do, but you have to know that my life gets _insane_ , so weird, even Jughead couldn’t keep up.” She looks at Veronica like she’s asking something.

“Betty,” Veronica says, sitting up straight in her seat and hoping to God she has the right answer. “My dad just held our high school reunion hostage at _bomb_ point; I think I’m prepared for the worst you can throw at me.”

“Oh yeah?” There’s a glint in Betty’s eye as she leans over the table to kiss Veronica, who surges to meet her. It’s only been an hour or so since their first kiss, but now, clutching Betty’s face, Veronica feels like after months in the desert, she’s drinking at last.

“Hey,” she says when they break apart. “Those kinds of lines are my thing.”

“See?” Betty says. “Every time I make some reference, I think of you—you’re a part of me.” Then, like she hasn’t knocked the air out of Veronica’s lungs, “whaddya say, Lodge? Wanna be partners in crime?”

Five years ago, Veronica would have decisively said that a setting like this was _not_ the right place for this type of moment. _What_ , she would have asked, _was_ _the best restaurant in town booked up completely? No space at the theatre? You couldn’t even manage the privacy of your own home or, God forbid, car?_ But now, the edge of Pop’s formica table digging into her hip and the sound of Kevin’s surprised whoop echoing in her ear, she knows she wouldn’t change a thing.

“Cooper,” Veronica says. “It would be my honor.”

***

Jughead doesn’t make it far, sitting down heavily on the steps outside of Pop’s. He breathes in and out quickly, trying to process what just happened.

He knows leaving like he did wasn’t the best reaction to the gravity of what Archie told them, but—he can’t think. He puts his elbows on his knees and tries to breathe.

The door opens with a jingle. “Hey.”

Jughead doesn’t look up. “Hey.”

Archie sits down beside him, assuming a similar position. Jughead waits for him to speak, then realizes with a stone in his gut that the responsibility to say something probably falls to him. He clears his throat and tries to think of what it might be.

“So,” Jughead says. “I’m sorry. For running out just now.”

“It’s alright,” Archie says. “I get that it’s—weird for you.”

“No,” Jughead says. “No, this is your moment, I should—” He shakes his head. “I wish I knew what to say.”

Archie smiles. “It’s okay,” he says. “It’s nice to just—have it out there.”

“Who else knows?”

“My mom does,” Archie says. He laughs. “It was a lot easier to come out to her once she had a wife, you know? But besides that, I guess just you guys.”

“Really?”

Archie ducks his head a little, as if he’s embarrassed. “Yeah, well, turns out I’m not very good at making relationships if it’s not with you.”

Jughead’s heart squeezes in his chest. Even when they’d been close friends, he’d always seen Archie as a sort of mythical hero, able to undergo crucible after crucible and emerge only galvanized by the heat. He was Jughead’s friend, yes, but he had always been larger than life in a way that allowed Jughead to keep him at a distance. Now, he’s just a man, sitting beside Jughead with a heaviness to his brow that Jughead can’t stand to look at.

“Me neither,” Jughead says. Archie smiles at him, but it doesn’t feel like enough. “I wished I had known, in high school.”

“Me too,” Archie says with a huff of laughter.

“You just always seemed so,” Jughead says, shaking his head, “untouchable, back then.”

“Really?” Archie says, brow furrowed.

“Yeah, you were this tough man football player with a big city girlfriend,” Jughead says. “And then you were all tangled up with Hiram Lodge, and _then_ you were in prison.” He laughs, a little ruefully. “The only time we got to hang out was when we were on the run together. I feel like—I feel like I’ve been missing you for longer than I ever had you next to me.”

Jughead doesn’t have the courage to look at Archie’s responding expression, so he just stares at his hands, clasped together so tightly his knuckles are turning white.

“Yeah,” Archie says, sounding hesitant. “I—-well, I already told you, but I missed you too.”

“No,” Jughead says. “I’m trying to—I don’t know.”

“What are you saying, Jug?” Archie places a gentle hand on his arm and Jughead looks up into his face. He looks a little confused, but now there’s a smile all around his eyes and mouth.

“I’m saying,” Jughead says, sight fixed on Archie’s eyes. “Half my life, whenever real life got to weird and hard and insane and I needed a fantasy to escape into, I thought about—you.”

“What?” Archie’s voice is very slight.

“Yeah, I know,” Jughead says. “It’s embarrassing to be in your twenties and still thinking about how much easier it would be if you had just—if you had just held on a little tighter to a person you wanted to spend all your time with when you were fourteen.”

“Jughead,” Archie says. His voice is grave. “I’m going to—I have to—” He places a hand between Jughead’s face and neck and looks at him imploringly.

“Yeah,” Jughead says, throat dry. He barely gets the word out before Archie is kissing him.

Jughead lets out a small noise that he might be embarrassed about under other circumstances, but the way Archie is pressing into him makes everything else fly from his mind. Traitorously, however, Archie pulls back after several moments.

“Are you,” he says, eyes dark. He clears his throat. “Are you sure?”

Rather than respond, Jughead pulls him in again. This time, the kiss lasts long enough that Jughead’s jaw aches slightly by the end of it.

Archie’s face is buried somewhere in Jughead’s neck when he mumbles something, the vibrations of it making Jughead shiver.

“What?”

“I said,” Archie says. “‘I’ve really got to start coming to more high school reunions.’”

Jughead punches him on the arm and he laughs, a giddy little sound that makes Jughead smile.

“Yeah,” he says, hand clasped on the back of Archie’s neck like he’ll never remove it. “I guess so.”

***

Jughead VO: _What makes an ending? Maybe, it takes meeting at the wrong time, then meeting again at the right one—maybe it’s defeating a madman with an inexplicable plan. Maybe, it just takes coming home._

_Whatever it requires, you can feel it when it happens, the end. In a way no one will be able to articulate, they now sense the bones of Riverdale settling, the trees themselves letting out a sigh of relief._

_Everything, at last, is as it should be._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah I just implied all the murders and crimes were bc these four boned in the wrong combination. What about it.
> 
> Anyway. Thanks for reading

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! The next chapter should be up soon I wanted to get all of this out before season five aired and instantly made it not relevant at all but then I didn’t write anything for months so! We reap what we sow. Anyway it’s all mostly written I just gotta edit so see you soon!
> 
> Disclaimer: I’ve watched consistently up to like, mid/late season 3? And then very sporadically from there but my sister was watching the entire show on a constant loop without earbuds this summer so I’ve got a decent idea of the events; also: at one point I was watching, w out earbuds full volume, the series finale of house md (yeah, I know) where the rsl is begging Hugh laurie to tell him he loves him at the same time as she was watching, w out earbuds full volume, jughead get beat to death with a rock. The ambiance.


End file.
